Magic? Not at all. If you have a problem with your server, with hangs up and things going very sloooow, check the cache. sessions and watchdog tables, and clear them.

It works like a charm :-)

categorias:

How important is having a database optimized. Doing some "basic" optimizations like clearing the cache, runing the Drupal cron and a couple of things more, your database can change from having 4 GB to just around 200MB... incredible? Not at all, the importance of maintenance tasks :-)

Which tasks? Mainly:

Clean / truncate the sessions table. This table can grow up to several millions of registers.

Carefull with the spammers. Your comment table can grow up to similar amounts if too many spammers take a look at you. If the problem is big, simply delete with phpmyadmin:

variable_set('apachesolr_advanced_search_form', $show_forms);

categorias:

Debugging cron issues and errors is one of the most tricky things in Drupal. If you are dealing with a big site, with people adding nodes, inserting content which you can't allways force to be commited in the right way, and things like that, it is not unusual to find a cron broken by some "misterious" node.

Well, it is quite easy to find this "misterious" offender, just logging the cron activity. How, very easy, with my new module "cron_killing_finder".

Just download it and follow the really simple instructions:

"Just activate it and go to /admin/reports/dblog. You'll find a "Node hook update_index: NID" string with the cron executions which tells you in last term which node is executed each time. If cron breaks, the last node reflected in the log will be the offender node, very simple :-)."

Hopefully it will be a new "complete" project, so you'll don't have to use git to download it.

categorias:

Sometimes you need to upload files to, for example, validate an affiliate with whom you want to start to work.

The problem, is that these affiliate files need to be "clean", no template, no theme, just the code or validation string which they send.

The solution can be very complicated, like creating a new theme just for a group or a contect of pages... or as simple as creating a node with the string which we need and executing a php code with an exit command. Something like this:

valicationStringLikeUZasdBNf6asdfT2asdfafjpdadf===58QYg==

<?php

exit;

?>

so, when you open this node, you'll see a blank page like the one in the screenshot.

Well, i don't like to use php inside nodes, this practice must be avoided, but for this case, the code is enough simple and, the most important thing, it doesn't break the cron execution. So, everyone happy :-).